Monday, May 18, 2009

Recent guild attempts have brought us into phase 3. This fight is truly a challenge, and has had many tripwires for our raiders to navigate and hurdle. With any numbers mentioned below, remember that this is for a 10-man raid!

Phase 1:Frogger NightmareThe keys: don't touch any of the gas clouds that circle the room in all directions, and don't be near the adds when they die if you can't take the explosion. Touching a cloud will trigger an add to spawn out of that cloud, in addition to the normal spawns that increasingly occur as Sara grows lower in health. Magic-cleansers need to be dispelling the Dominate Mind debuff. The goal of this phase is to explode adds on Sara to reduce her to 0% HP.

Note: add the debuffs "Sara's Blessing" and "Sara's Anger" to your Grid frames. You can't cleanse it, but it's good to know who's gotthese debuffs so you can keep HoTs on them while they're eating the damage.

The Clique addon currently has a bug that will prevent its user from dispelling the dominate mind debuff. If you are a priest/pally, disable this addon for this boss, until the bug is fixed.

We tried several strats, attempting a "raid is by the door" strat, a general chaos scatter strat with two tanks, and a middle-tanking strat with two tanks, but each of those always resulted in someone dieing from range, or too many adds would get spawned and overrun the raid. Overruns tend to go like this:

Someone(s) touch a cloud and spawn more adds.

More adds = more mind controls.

Mind controls run into clouds and get dispelled while in/near the clouds and spawn more adds.

Tanks focus on picking up the extra adds rather than getting any killed, to rescue healers.

Adds use a dark volley that aoe's the raid and puts a 10-second debuff on everyone hit that reduces the healing done to them.

We wipe in a chaotic spiral of death.

The strat that won out for us was to have ONE TANK in the middle of the room, dodging clouds in the pool around Sara, with several durable melee. The ranged and healers would circle the room out of the pool of liquid in the center (out of range of the dieing adds' explosions), moving mostly as a group to dodge the comings and goings of the clouds, which have a habit of boxing people in since they move in both directions. Any squishy melee need to run out before the adds explode, since the boom does 25k damage.

The first time we attempted this one-tank strat, we got to phase 2. There was much rejoicing.

Macro this and use for an achievement at the transition from P1 to P2, when Sara goes from being a green friendly to a red hostile:

/tar Sara/kiss/targetlasttarget

Phase 2:Love Your Cleanse ButtonThe keys: have speedy cleanses, keep a close eye on your sanity debuff, move with your tank, don't touch the green Wrath-graphic eyebeams, and stand near whoever you have a brain-link with.

SANITY:This is the first phase where there is a high chance that a player might go insane and thus loose complete control of their character. Even battle-ressing them will not save them. EVERYONE needs to watch their sanity debuffs and renew them as often as possible by standing in the happy greenSanity Wellbeams of light that Freya casts to help the raid. Don't let yourself get too low, or a chain series of unfortunate sanity losses may make you loose yourself.

"Outside Group:"Things get chaotic in this phase, and you should probably have a raid icon marking your topside MT so that the topside (or outside) group can stay together while running around killing the giant crusher tentacles. You do not want people splitting up in this room, or fate will giggle at them and brain link people too far away to reach each other before they die.

The brain link does 3k damage + 2% sanity loss per second to both afflicted players if they are more than 20yds apart. You can tell the "safe distance" by the color of the beam: it is red if you're too far apart, and yellow if you are safe. It is possible to be brain-linked to yourself: in which case, don't leave yourself behind ;) It is okay to enter a portal with a brain link, because entering the portal will break the link safely.

CLEANSE!! There are poisons, curses, diseases, and magic debuffs all being thrown around the raid like a giant tossed salad of doom. These are cast by the corrupter tentacles. The more corrupter tentacles, the more debuffs on the raid. Cleanse as much as you can, as they stack and generally make you think that you, as a player, are going insane when they start to overwhelm the raid. Ranged DPS should be taking these corrupters out as you move around the room, but only as a third priority.

There's an occasional single-target fear effect that will last about 4 seconds; it is contagious, so move away from feared players so you don't catch it when their fear wears off.

Crusher tentacles are the MT's target. They're big and you shouldn't stand next to them as a healer, in case they decide to take a swipe at you. The more attacks done to them, the faster and harder-hitting they get: thus, if they get too strong, the group should move out of melee range of them and wait for the Focused Anger buffs to reset (like the Snaplashers from Freya). These are the major priority to get down, because they reduce raid-wide damage (even those inside the portals) by 20% for every crusher tentacle up.

Constrictor Tentacles can and will pop out of the ground and grab someone, waving them around in the air while damaging them for about 6800 damage per second. You can heal through it with a heavy hand of hots, but you should alert your dps to rescue you if you're grabbed, so that you can continue moving freely with the group and save mana/GCDs. These are the dps' secondary kill priority, outside of Yogg's Mind.

"Inside Group:"The group tagged for combat in the Mind's Eye must jump into individual portals that spawn abut every 90 seconds around the room to enter Yogg's mind and combat the Influence Tentacles and Yogg's brain therein. We had an enhance shammy in there helping top off heals, since the portal group didn't have much time outside before they had to hop back in, and most of that was spent in the sanity wells. Those that enter the mind's eye have the strongest chance of going insane, since there are laughing skulls down there that drive you insane just facing them.

Avoid facing the laughing skulls inside Yogg's Mind, as they will rapidly deteriorate your sanity. Facing away from them prevents the sanity loss.

Yogg will also cast Induce Madness that will cause anyone still in the Mind's Eye to automatically go insane; you are safe from this if you are outside of his mind. You need strong dps in there, since they are the ones that will bring you into Phase 3, by bringing Yogg's brain to 30%.

#1 priority when exiting Yogg's Mind is to restore sanity in the Sanity Wells.

Phase 3:In ProgressWe've only seen this phase a couple of times so far, enough to know that there are more adds that must be dps'd down quickly, and that all healers should just face a wall to keep from loosing sanity looking at the laughing skulls :)

Any further advice would be appreciated! We've been combing the strategy guides for tips, but most of them are just for 25-mans. My favorite of the video guides among the 25-mans is StratFu's 2-part instructional video by Kyth of Fusion.

5 comments:

Hi Kae! We too are just starting our Yogg-Saron journey, so the two of us can commiserate together ;-)

We spent Saturday night with our 10 man for a couple of ours, and then Sunday night with our 25 man for about 4.5 hours.

We found that putting the melee and tank in the middle dodging clouds worked well (if the melee are paying attention), and then our casters/healers also circled the center by "chasing" the clockwise cloud in the third orbit from Sara.

Neither of our groups made it into phase 3 (hopefully we can see it tonight in our 25). We had some solid phase 2 pulls in our 25, but our "brain" people couldn't get the brain down fast enough (I think our best pull was 48%, but that was after 5 [ugh] portal phases). Our biggest issue was those that were supposed to get in the brain getting CC'd somehow (damn constrictor tentacles) and missing their portals (how did you all deal with that?).

Our ranged up top are staying on top of the crushers prety well, however they really don't have much time in between crusher spawns to get the corruptors or crusher tentacles down. Because we aren't getting the brian down fast engouh we are getting completely overwhelmed by the little tenticles!

Anyhow! We have tonight for our 25 man, and two weekend nights next weekend for our 10 man, so hopefully we can make some progress! I will be sure to let you know if we come upon any tips =)

I poked my hubby (blood DK) for his input on how the portal group dealt with getting to portals, and his reply was:

"the big thing is that the melee should ignore everything up top except constrictor tentacles until portals pop...and hope to heck that their cleansers are doing their jobs..."

I imagine they took out the corruptor tentacles too, but only when they had a chance; he says they didn't have much time once the portals started spawning. Our portal group was just 3 melee dps (feral cat, blood DK, enhance shammy). Most of our wipes resulted from them going insane while trying to push out the last bit of brain dps they could :(

So far, I've only killed him on 10man. This is the strat that worked for us.

Phase1: We had the MT (a bear) and the OT (a fury warrior) on the middle with everyone else running moving around being mindful of always being in a "really" safe spot, as in not about to be surrounded by clouds. The last thing is important cause people can get stunned, feared, etc by another player mind controlled and end on top of a cloud if they are too close too one. We tried the standing at the door strat too, but failed horribly.

Phase2:We had all the meele go into the portals, only 1 person per portal is allow, so make sure everyone on the inside group moves near a portal spawn point when they are about to spawn, the faster you get in, the more time to dps the brain you have.Outside group needs to kill the big tentacles as fast as possible without getting into meele range. If you have dispels, and no one gets into meele range, this phase should be easy as long as the inside group doesn't fail on portals or sanity. Constrictor tentacles aren't that big of deal, if you get trapped but your are still in range of the crusher, everyone should keep dpsing the crusher 1st, and then get you out.

Phase 3: Everyone stand in front of his mouth, give the MT a few seconds to get out of his "mind dimension" and pick up the add before a healer dies due to heal aggro (happened to us). Then have the MT and healers turn around and not face yogg, and the dps get ready to turn around when he casts the spell. Whenever the tank was ok with the damage from the adds, the dps were on the boss. And when needed they switched to the adds.

Thanks for the input, Kringol! A couple questions: how many healers, and how many melee did you have in your raid? We were trying it with 3 healers and 3 melee + tank (and thus, 3 ranged dps too).

We kept our MT on the outside to "tank" the crushers, so that he could keep the Diminish Power debuff from stacking too high.

I agree that the constrictor tentacles are very easy to heal through and you can leave someone in them to get a crusher down, as long as healers are aware of the constricted person and put heals on them quickly enough :) Hmmm... I wonder if I can add the "Squeeze" from the constrictors to Grid?